Events Calendar

CAMS Seniors are presenting their Comps each followed by a short Q&A.

The following seniors will be presenting:

• 9:00-9:30 am - Alex Berlin

• 9:30-10:00 am - William Thorpe

• 10:00-10:30 am - Ali Reilly presents The Devil’s West: Writing a Western for Today’s America 
   
  • 10:30-10:45 am - Coffee break

• 10:45-11:15 am - Suhail Thandi presents Bollywood's New Representations: The Changing Role of Women in Hindi Cinema. 

  Bollywood cinema has usually been codified and understood through very persistent paradmims for several decades, beginning in the late 1980s and permeating into the early twenty-first century. However, the paper Bollywood's New Representations shows that a lot of these methods of analyzing movies, especially understanding how women and female characters are represented in movies, has changed. The paper looks at three movies from the last few years: No One Killed Jessica (Raj Kumar Gupta, 2011) Gulaab Gang (Soumik Sen, 2014), and Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016) and how greater changes in Indian culture have resulted in the changes on the big screen as well. While it's a small section of a pond in a large ocean of Indian filmmaking and representations, contemporary Bollywood movies indicate that there is a need for newer theoretical literature to replace the academic writing that dictates how much of Indian Hindi cinema is understood.
  

• 11:15- 11:45 am- Madi Emenheiser

• 11:45-12:15 pm - Zizi Li presents A Radical Break? Remediating Film Theory in Examining Instagram. 

  Social media has been an extremely popular research topic for computer scientists and social scientists. Surprisingly, film and media theorists seem to have been excluded from the study and conversation of 'new' media as these technologies get more and more complicated and advanced. Instagram, as a visual-driven social media, is of no exception.

  ​​In this comps project, I theorize Instagram via the lens of film and media theory and examine if Instagram constitutes a radical break with prior media. I remediate the “ontology-epistemology-aesthetic” structure to investigate Instagram. Starting with the ontological section, I add the discussion of medium specificity into the study of Instagram as a new media built upon the strategies of both and new media, including World Wide Web,photography, collage, Snapchat and more. Moreover, the epistemological section bridges a dialogue among the cognition, haptic, and optic of users’ experience of interaction, embodiment, participatory culture with Instagram. It is then followed by the aesthetic section in which I examine Instagram’s styles and conventions regarding each and every individual photo as well as a collection of photos, borrowing core elements of analysis of film art including the framing, color, mise-en-scene, etc. I then wrap up this framework by asserting this paper’s stand as a reading of Instagram from the perspective of film and media theory. 

  In a sense, I am reclaiming media theorists’ rights to study Instagram and other visual-driven social media.

• • 12:15-1:00 pm - Lunch break
    

• 1:00-1:30 pm - Ayana Lance

• 1:30-2:00 pm - Brian Gordon presents Perception and Feeling, then Meaning.  An Experimental Short film about a person who is sitting in a room. As they attempt to derive meaning from the phenomenon in the space, their process of deriving meaning from the phenomenon in the space changes according the formally derived meaning from the phenomena. As their experiences of the same space and items change, their relationship to the act of experiencing changes. *There is Nudity in this Film*

• 2:00-2:30 pm - Zach Leonard
   
  • 2:30-2:45 pm - Break

• 2:45-3:15 pm - Camille Sanchez

• 3:15-3:45 pm - Tumi Akin-Deko

• 3:45-4:15 pm - Ibad Jafri
  • 4:15-4:30 pm - Break

• 4:30-5:00 pm - Joshu Creel presents The Enemy's Enemy: The Power of Worldbuilding. 

  'We need fictions in order to experiment with possible selves and to learn to take our places in the real world.' - J. Hillis Miller

  In creating the world of The Enemy's Enemy, a science-fiction TV drama, I've been able to discover genre fiction's unique power: that a fantastical world full of new technology, odd cultures, and complex people with grand ambitions and epic-scale goals can be in dialogue with the minutiae that make our world our own. No fantasy universe exists entirely independent from the conditions in which it was written, and this one is no different. In my presentation I will explore the nature of worldbuilding as well as present to you the world which I have created and the ways it can be come a fully-fledged series, from series bible through first episode pilot script. 

  So please join me and dive into the Zihajan planetary system, learning the machinations and struggles which define its existence. Follow a hero’s journey into the center of a malevolent empire, an exploratory mission into an untapped landscape, and the teeming heart of chaos which thrives in the empire’s capital.

• 5:00-5:30 pm -  Ian MacEneany